he one thing most people know about Hong Kong is that it boasts what are probably the highest real-estate prices in the world. Whether that claim is apocryphal or not, there’s no doubting that with a parking space in Central fetching upwards of $6,000,000 HK (around $765,000 US), the cost per square foot of real estate on the island is ruinously high -- a factor you might think would work against high-end-audio sales. The possibility of sharing lounge space with a large audio system is remote, while the cost of a dedicated listening space is beyond all but the fabulously rich. Yet, Hong Kong has always been a vibrant high-end market, with ambitious systems shoehorned into unlikely spaces, systems that employ speakers that seem unfeasibly large for the size of the room they occupy. One look at a Hong Kong audiophile system and you know that this is a distinctly different world. Suspended between East and West, Hong Kong was first established as a Crown Colony, a trading portal for silk and tea traveling west, wool and industrial goods flowing east. As such, it has always been a cultural hybrid, a situation that has evolved over the years, especially since its return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. With the increasing industrial might of the mainland poised just across the border, along with its booming yet chaotic explosion of consumer spending and manufacturing (including, of course, both indigenous and OEM audio products), Hong Kong’s role may have changed, but it is just as busy a crossroads as ever. The chance to experience any audiophile’s system is never less than interesting. The chance to experience such a system in Hong Kong is especially fascinating, revealing the different attitudes and concerns, interests and priorities of Hong Kong audiophiles compared to those in the US or Europe. But the system covered here is also different in a number of other ways, starting with the room it occupies and finishing with how it got there. Its owner, Roman Yeung, is Yeung by name and young by nature. As a longtime audiophile, he long harbored dreams of his ultimate system, a system that changed over the years, with new products and new experiences. Nothing unusual in that, you might well think. What was unusual was Roman’s approach to reaching that goal, a long wait followed by a one-time purchase, rather than a gradual climb up the audiophile ladder. But first he had to find the space to house his system. Visiting Roman requires a thirty-to-forty-minute drive from Kennedy Town on Hong Kong Island, where we were staying. He lives in a set of low-level, seafront apartments built in the 1970s as a holiday complex, long before the city’s infrastructure had reached into the New Territories. Back then it would have taken many hours, traveling on back roads, to reach the development, which helps explain the relatively spacious layout of the apartments. Such is the demand for space that modern highways cross huge bridges to reach deep into the hinterland, flanked on either side by ranks of high-rise blocks. Those same highways and the ready access to the city they provide have transformed the fortunes of this one-time holiday complex -- and convinced Roman that the large spaces on offer were too good an opportunity to miss.
Walking into Roman’s listening room, most European and certainly most Americans wouldn’t be struck by its size. That’s partly down to differing expectations and partly down to the amount of floor space consumed by the system standing at one end. Look past that system and the other furniture in the room and you’ll find a space that’s around 18’ (5.5m) wide and 26’ (8m) long -- vast by Hong Kong standards. Even so, it is totally dominated by the Cessaro Beethoven five-way horn speakers ($525,000 per pair), massive spherical horn arrays with integrated active, folded-horn subwoofers that hail from Germany and tower over the rest of the system. Almost as soon as Roman started the search for his dream system, he realized that only a horn speaker could deliver the sense of life and immediacy that he was seeking, narrowing both the speaker and system options. At 7’ (2.15m) tall, the Beethovens are Cessaro’s flagship speakers and only just scrape in beneath the ceiling, with its deep, cellular construction. The four purple spherical horn trumpets are vertically arranged, with the three upper units employing TAD compression drivers with an 11” paper cone driver for the large midbass trumpet and a pair of 16” field-coil drivers, each with its own dedicated solid-state amplifier in each dining-table-sized subwoofer. Alnico magnets are used throughout the rest of the speaker and deliver a system sensitivity of 107dB with bandwidth down to 27Hz, although Cessaro doesn’t specify the limits on that.
The German company also supplies the main electronics for the system, in the form of their transformer-coupled Air One passive preamp ($58,000) and a pair of massive Air Two monoblocks ($290,000 per pair), placed front and center before the system and each delivering 50 watts from a pair of parallel single-ended 211 tubes. In a first nod to Asian audiophile sensibilities, the amps are equipped with exactingly chosen NOS glass, with matched pairs of rare GE VT4Cs for the output tubes.
The system’s digital front-end is based around the superb Wadax Atlantis DAC ($65,000), a unit that has recently been gracing my own system while I work on reviewing it, along with its matching transport. In this system it is partnered with a French JMF Audio DMT 3.7 universal transport, a substantial, top-loading unit built around the company’s own BDPM1 transport mechanism. This is constructed atop a solid-aluminum block, the 30kg result being mounted on a dedicated composite grounding platform. The disc is covered by a full-width carbon clamp and the transport supports CD, SACD and Blu-ray Pure Music replay. There’s also an option for A/V output, although in Roman’s system surround duties are carried out by a secondary setup.
Of course, no system can function without cables, power and supports, and here again we see local sensibilities emerge. Cabling is a mix, comprising Skogrand Beethoven interconnects ($21,500 per 1.5-meter pair) and speaker cables ($24,500 per 2.5-meter pair) and mainly Dalby Audio power cords (Ł10,000 per two-meter length), although a pair of Argento FMR EE power cords (€16,000 each, per two-meter length) is used to feed the Atlantis DAC and the Robert Koda MC One phono stage ($60,000, of which more later). So far so good and all pretty normal; less familiar is the Vertere HB phase-management distribution block (Ł12,000), a multi-output "power strip" that allows you to switch the AC phase individually for each component in the system. This is used in combination with a trio of Tripoint ground filters: a Troy Signature ($20,000) for the main system and a pair of Empress units for the speakers ($40,000 per pair). What with Entreq, CAD and Nordost’s Qkore units, you might think that US and European audiophiles are taking ground quality seriously, but all three pale into insignificance compared to the massive and massively expensive Tripoint units, which have been doing ground control for longer and far more seriously than anybody else. This emphasis on AC quality and noise is well established in China, Japan and Hong Kong, while in the West we are scrambling to catch up. The system is supported on a Subbase Shambala table (€12,000), with Écho LS platforms (€5000) under the power amps (prices on application; this made-to-order furniture offers myriad finish and price options), meaning that considerable attention has been paid to all aspects of system infrastructure. The boxes here might be big and impressive, the speakers are certainly imposing, but they haven’t distracted from or diluted the all-important attention to detail. Listening started with that well-known audiophile party piece, Telarc’s Ein Straussfest [CD 80098], the "Thunder and Lightning Polka" presenting with quite literally explosive dynamic impact and snap. Transients were suitably startling, with sudden, thunderclap impact. Apart from the sheer jump factor possible with a system like this, one thing this disc established immediately was just how critical the setup was of absolute phase -- and just how clearly it revealed the benefits of Furutech’s DeMag and DeStat devices. It’s not just the musical performance that a system like this reveals, but the performance of the system itself. Familiar discs played through the JMF Audio/Wadax/Cessaro chain were delivered with all the scale and dynamic impact I’d expect, but there was much more to this system than simple wham-bam fireworks. Underpinning the music was a planted stability that brought substance and a temporal calm to performances. The music never sounded hurried or jumbled, while the Cessaro horns were free of edge or glare, allowing me to concentrate on the structure and phrasing of the music rather than the mechanics of its presentation. For my go-to recording for this trip, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli’s live recording of the Beethoven Piano Concerto No.1 (Giulini and the VSO [Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft 2531 302]), I brought the CD, SHM SACD, original LP and Speakers Corner 180-gram reissue, allowing cross-format comparisons. The orchestral playing was beautifully measured, the interlocking phrases perfectly balanced (and unmistakably Giulini), while the piano was crisp, incisive and smoothly fluid. The presentation was not as dimensionally coherent or explicit as I’ve heard from other systems, but those all feature significantly wider bandwidth -- and much lower sensitivity. It was a shortcoming more than made up for by the drama and emotional range presented by this system. In absolute terms, I could have asked for greater note-to-note articulation and intra-instrumental transparency, but that’s a question of taste and listening bias -- and maybe a choice between 211 and 300B output tubes. Roman played a whole range of different material, and the system certainly rose to the challenge. Music as varied as Morphine and Lou Reed, Camilla Wicks and Lisa Batiashvili was presented with power and aplomb. The deep, motive bass line that underpins "Buena" (Cure For Pain [Rykodisc RCD10262]) was delivered with a perfectly centered sense of power and pace, the “colored girls” on "Walk on the Wild Side" arrived from way, way back beyond the front wall, their voices superbly separated. If Batiashvili’s Shostakovich Violin Concerto (Echoes of Time [Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft 0289 477 9299 4]) isn’t a great recording, it presented no barrier to this system revealing the brilliance of the performance and this ability to cut to the musical heart of proceedings was further demonstrated by Camilla Wicks, whose 1952 recording of the Sibelius Violin Concerto (originally released as an EMI microgroove mono LP and re-released on Green Door [GDCL-0004]) offers an even starker contrast between musical and sonic quality. Yet Roman’s system never missed a beat, fastening on the solo instrument and allowing it to soar, unfettered and unworried by the narrow-bandwidth recording. No matter the quality of the recording, the music was never forward or aggressive, sat on or dull, the front-end digging out the life in any performance and the amps and speakers only too happy to deliver it. The Dawson/Christiansen "bootleg" duets didn’t have that reach-out-and-touch dimensionality that I can achieve with a speaker like the Wilson Alexx, but then I wonder if the cost of that quality, in this case, might have been the loss of the musical generosity and access that makes this system so versatile.
This brings me to the experience of vinyl replay. Roman is bedding in a recently acquired Hartvig Statement turntable, complete with massive copper platter and battery power supply (€78,000), carrying a Thales Statement tonearm (20,000 CHF) and a Miajima Madake Snakewood cartridge ($7000). The Robert Koda Takumi MC One and the deck are equipped with a Dalby turntable mat and clamp along with a Vertere tonearm cable. Like the Wadax Atlantis DAC, key components in this analog front-end are more than passingly familiar -- albeit in junior versions. Having reviewed both the Hartvig turntable and the Thales Simplicity II tonearm, I was far from surprised by the easy, unforced sense of musical flow, tonal purity and lack of grain that characterized Roman’s record player. The Statement version of both tonearm and turntable add dynamic range and a more emphatic rhythmic precision to proceedings, although playing the Speakers Corner pressing of the Benedetti Michelangeli, I was surprised by a lack of authority and attack in the left hand of the piano, a lack of the air and tension in the performance as a whole. Switching to the LA4’s Just Friends [Concord Jazz LELP114] confirmed my suspicions that the record player’s primary focus lay firmly in the tonality and phrasing of the midband, the silky guitar and breathy sax having beautiful tonality and shape. If I had to point a finger, then, it would be squarely at the Miyajima Madake cartridge, a transducer that works wonders with voices but is less convincing on wider-bandwidth material, like the Vienna Symphony or Ray Brown’s bass. If confirmation was needed, it was certainly quick to arrive. As I’ve already mentioned, the record player is the latest addition to the system and is far from settled, my visit coinciding with Roman auditioning the Fuuga cartridge ($8975), my own moving coil of choice. The Thales Statement tonearm, with its interchangeable cartridge-mounting platforms and graduated adjustments for VTA and azimuth, made swapping the cartridges a simple and relatively pain-free process, and the system was soon back up and running with its new needle. From the very first notes, it was obvious that this was a night-and-day difference, in terms of both the character and quality of the cartridges. The Fuuga instilled the music with a dramatic sense of immediacy, energy and power. Underpinned by significantly greater extension at both frequency extremes, the dynamism and authority in performances were pushed firmly to the fore. Arturo’s left hand suddenly regained the weight and attack that make it so musically effective, while Johanna Martzy’s Mendelssohn [Testament SBTLP 1483] took on a new sense of tension and poised control, her effortless power and masterful technique revealed in a way that had completely escaped the Miyajima. Rock and pop as varied as Pink Floyd and Hugh Masekela were brought vividly to life, with a weight and dynamic impact, scale and immediacy but also an intimacy that lifted the musical experience to a completely different level. The downsides were the loss of the Miyajima’s rather rose-tinted beauty and a hint of sharpness at the top end, but given the quick-and-dirty nature of the setup, I don’t think that would be too hard to tame, as it certainly isn’t inherent to either the cartridge or the amplifiers and speakers. Experimenting with loading on the Robert Koda phono stage would, I suspect, pay dividends, but it was outside the scope of this visit.
Detailed discussion of setting up brings me to the unseen factor in this setup. In selecting and installing the system, Roman worked closely with Audio Exotics, a Hong Kong distributor with a difference. Although Audio Exotics offers the expected sheaf of high-end, high-profile products (Wadax, Zanden, Robert Koda, Göbel, Cessaro), they also emphasize the role of setup and tuning in delivering maximum musical potential. Their influence can be clearly seen in the presence of the impressively effective Tripoint grounding products, the Vertere phase-management block, the insistence on coherent equipment support and the eclectic but exactingly selected range of cables used. Audio Exotics’ influence can also be heard in the coherent musical performance of the system as a whole and the way it dealt with the not inconsiderable challenges of power supply, space and the compromises inherent in any apartment block. The other factor contributing to an extremely enjoyable musical experience was the light-touch application of Artnovion acoustic treatment, with bass traps behind the speakers, strategically located absorbers and first-reflection diffuser panels. The cuboid ceiling cells that hover just above the speakers have been treated with curved absorbers, although more treatment might well be necessary, given both their depth and their proximity to the top-most driver. That aside, this is a seriously sorted setup, as
entertaining as it is musically insightful. The Cessaro Beethovens do what spherical horns
do and do it with finesse and grace that have always escaped them in my previous
encounters with this speaker at shows, which goes to demonstrate just how unreliable show
experiences can be. Seamlessly integrated and effortlessly dynamic, they matched the
energy and life of live performances with ease, reveling in the musical coherence of the
two top-flight front-ends feeding them their musical diet. The Wadax Atlantis confirmed
its credentials as the most satisfying DAC I’ve heard to date, while the Thales
Statement tonearm has simply increased my impatience for the arrival of the review sample.
Recent experience with Robert Koda’s latest line stage as well as this phono stage
has pushed those products well up my list of review targets. Roman was a gracious and
entertaining host, only too happy to share his sheer pleasure in a system he has always
dreamed of owning. Mind you -- having said that, I don’t need a crystal ball to see a
Fuuga cartridge in his future. |
